Cover art for Rafen, by Martin Kintanar. © 2015. This week, the e-version of my début novel went on pre-order. After over ten years of working on this book, on and off, I can hardly believe that I'm here. Who would have thought it was possible?
Voices from all sides tell an author to advertise aggressively. But rather than sit here and type "buymybookbuymybookbuymybook" I thought I would do something different. Very few people are interested in something promoted with robot-like persistence anyway. Experience has taught me that humans are interested in stories. And a story is exactly what I want to give you. I don't think I'll be able to tell this one in one blog post, so I'll spread it out over a few weeks.
Here it is: the story behind Rafen.
I was a homeschooled kid. A lot of people think homeschoolers are freaks, and they wouldn't have been too far off the mark with me. My other siblings are not insane. It's just me. I guess I caught the author bug young. From the time that my Mum pressed one of those super thick pencils into my hand and told me to write "Yvette", I meant to have my name on a cover one day.
Why would a five-year-old want to become an author? Why would a kid who can barely write one word want to write an entire book one day? What could be worse? I can't answer any of these questions. I can only say what my heart was set on. Who knows the reasons behind it all?
My notebooks from when I was six prove that I was writing about my main character and his female sidekick even back then. However, she was the centre of attention in those days. It was when I became a tomboy, at age ten, that the main character became male forever.
At age eight or nine, I remember one of Dad's old colleagues coming over to see us in Australia. She showed a huge amount of interest in my crazy designs of becoming an author, and she encouraged me. While she was visiting, I wrote five or six handwritten A4 pages of what I hoped would be my first book. I never finished it. My hand got sore.
When we went to Sydney, when I was ten years old, the folks whose place we were house-sitting at had a Harry Potter book on the shelf. My sister read it and then told me to have a go. I read it, decided it offended me, and vowed and declared I would write something better. (The crazy thing is, I'm a huge HP fan now.) I was a bit of an arrogant toad back then. I'm slightly less so now, and still working on toning down my stubborn ego.
Anyway, the end result was that I started writing my first book at age ten. When we returned from holiday, I began typing it on the family computer, secretly, during school time. I was meant to be learning how to type by going through a course my Mum had given me. Instead, I was writing a fantasy novel. Rebellious, right? I learned to type in the end. I'm probably the fastest in the family.
By the end of the year, I had written 55,000 words, and I was sure I was on the high road to fame. Hilarious. My Dad read it. And here's the bit that's interesting in this story. Any other parent would have said: "Wow, kid. You're amazing." I'm a teacher now, and I haven't meant any ten or eleven-year-old that has the level of literacy I did at that age. That's not to say I was incredible. I was just precocious. But school teachers would have loved me. My Dad? He saw how serious I was, and he gave me the greatest gift I could possibly have. He was serious back.
I said: "I'm going to get it published."
He said: "There's no way anyone's going to publish this."
Me: "Why not?"
Dad: "The characters make no sense, half the time we don't even know where they are, and there's no plot."
Me: "What's plot?"
Wow. Dad said to me: "I think you're going to have to rewrite this."
I remember having difficulty talking. Another whole year of giving up computer games? Another whole year of sweating over writing this book while my friends called me weird? I didn't know if I could do it.
It took me about two or three days to think it over. I wanted to get it published. I wanted to do it so badly that it was a constant ache in my bones. And I didn't want to just publish anything. I wanted to publish this idea, this boy - the slave turned hero. Nothing else would do.
I comforted myself by telling myself I could type pretty quickly by now.
Voices from all sides tell an author to advertise aggressively. But rather than sit here and type "buymybookbuymybookbuymybook" I thought I would do something different. Very few people are interested in something promoted with robot-like persistence anyway. Experience has taught me that humans are interested in stories. And a story is exactly what I want to give you. I don't think I'll be able to tell this one in one blog post, so I'll spread it out over a few weeks.
Here it is: the story behind Rafen.
I was a homeschooled kid. A lot of people think homeschoolers are freaks, and they wouldn't have been too far off the mark with me. My other siblings are not insane. It's just me. I guess I caught the author bug young. From the time that my Mum pressed one of those super thick pencils into my hand and told me to write "Yvette", I meant to have my name on a cover one day.
Why would a five-year-old want to become an author? Why would a kid who can barely write one word want to write an entire book one day? What could be worse? I can't answer any of these questions. I can only say what my heart was set on. Who knows the reasons behind it all?
My notebooks from when I was six prove that I was writing about my main character and his female sidekick even back then. However, she was the centre of attention in those days. It was when I became a tomboy, at age ten, that the main character became male forever.
At age eight or nine, I remember one of Dad's old colleagues coming over to see us in Australia. She showed a huge amount of interest in my crazy designs of becoming an author, and she encouraged me. While she was visiting, I wrote five or six handwritten A4 pages of what I hoped would be my first book. I never finished it. My hand got sore.
When we went to Sydney, when I was ten years old, the folks whose place we were house-sitting at had a Harry Potter book on the shelf. My sister read it and then told me to have a go. I read it, decided it offended me, and vowed and declared I would write something better. (The crazy thing is, I'm a huge HP fan now.) I was a bit of an arrogant toad back then. I'm slightly less so now, and still working on toning down my stubborn ego.
Anyway, the end result was that I started writing my first book at age ten. When we returned from holiday, I began typing it on the family computer, secretly, during school time. I was meant to be learning how to type by going through a course my Mum had given me. Instead, I was writing a fantasy novel. Rebellious, right? I learned to type in the end. I'm probably the fastest in the family.
By the end of the year, I had written 55,000 words, and I was sure I was on the high road to fame. Hilarious. My Dad read it. And here's the bit that's interesting in this story. Any other parent would have said: "Wow, kid. You're amazing." I'm a teacher now, and I haven't meant any ten or eleven-year-old that has the level of literacy I did at that age. That's not to say I was incredible. I was just precocious. But school teachers would have loved me. My Dad? He saw how serious I was, and he gave me the greatest gift I could possibly have. He was serious back.
I said: "I'm going to get it published."
He said: "There's no way anyone's going to publish this."
Me: "Why not?"
Dad: "The characters make no sense, half the time we don't even know where they are, and there's no plot."
Me: "What's plot?"
Wow. Dad said to me: "I think you're going to have to rewrite this."
I remember having difficulty talking. Another whole year of giving up computer games? Another whole year of sweating over writing this book while my friends called me weird? I didn't know if I could do it.
It took me about two or three days to think it over. I wanted to get it published. I wanted to do it so badly that it was a constant ache in my bones. And I didn't want to just publish anything. I wanted to publish this idea, this boy - the slave turned hero. Nothing else would do.
I comforted myself by telling myself I could type pretty quickly by now.
